The FBI has released the last of its surveillance documents on John Lennon to an historian who has fought for 25 years to obtain them.

The 10 pages offer some new details on Lennon's suspected ties with leftist and anti-war groups in the 1970s, but reveal nothing indicating U.S. government officials considered the former Beatle a serious threat, historian Jon Wiener told the Los Angeles Times in Wednesday's editions.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of the papers was a surveillance report stating that two prominent British leftists attempted to persuade Lennon to finance "a left-wing bookshop and reading room in London" but that Lennon gave them no money.

Another page states that there was "no certain proof" that Lennon had provided money "for subversive purposes."

'Absurd' claims

Wiener first requested the documents in 1981, after deciding to write a book about Lennon following the singer/songwriter's murder the year before by a deranged fan in New York City.

The FBI originally provided some files showing Lennon had been closely monitored from 1971-1972, but withheld the rest, saying they contained national security information and were thus exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

The unreleased files, the FBI said, were provided by an unnamed foreign government, and making them public could result in diplomatic, political or economic retaliation against the U.S.

Wiener sued the U.S. government and received some of the document in 1997 as part of a settlement. In 2004, a judge ordered the FBI to hand over the remaining 10 pages.

"I doubt that [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair's government will launch a military strike on the U.S. in retaliation for the release of these documents," Wiener told the L.A. Times. "Today, we can see that the national security claims that the FBI has been making for 25 years were absurd from the beginning."

With files from the Associated Press